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Nice to meet you, Butters. Glad you are here. Butters! I have yet to officially welcome you. I have already enjoyed your posts… It’s nice to have you here!
Butters wrote:I didn’t understand how non-LDS people could be so amazingly happy in their life and marriages. I thought the gospel only brought that kind of happiness.
Heber13 wrote:Butters, I have experienced the same thing as you, in that some people outside the church are such good people and as I’ve become friends with them, respect them and accept they have spiritual experiences that are real all the time. In fact, my good buddy outside the church is probably the most Christ-like person I have come to know, and I strive to follow his example. It has made me ponder about the church’s claims also, and I have come to accept the following:
1) I should not judge – that means I should not give LDS members more credit than is due, and I should not underestimate those of other religions, including Buddhists, Hindu, Muslim, atheists, or anyone. In realizing this, I feel I have understood better some of Jesus’ teachings. Not just tolerate or refrain from thinking bad things about others, but truly respecting them as much as I respect GA’s or other righteous people. I can accept that good is good, wherever it comes from and it actually makes more sense for a loving God to work with all His children than to think He only blesses Mormons.
I love this line of thinking. My best friends are a married couple that have proven themselves as true friends despite the time and distance that separate us. These friends are not LDS. Some years back a common LDS acquaintance who knew of our long and close friendship wondered aloud how it was that after all these years I hadn’t managed to be a better influence to convert them. This hurt my feelings. Not just because it was insensitive but because I worried about having that “why didn’t you tell me?” confrontation with my friends in the afterlife. I worried about failing my friends. In the intervening years, I hope my views have matured: Sure these friends would make great Mormons, but they remain fine examples of children of God regardless of their religious affiliation.
More recently I was studying the story of the Good Samaritan for the Sunday school lesson and I saw it in a whole new light. Rather than just the “help others” and “when you are in the service of your fellow men” lesson, I focused on the history of the conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans. Not only were the Samaritans inbred heathens from the Jewish perspective, but they were also blasphemous in claiming that their corrupted forms of worship were actually the true form accepted by Jehovah. The good Samaritan would have actually been trespassing on Jewish land in the story. It made me wonder who might be a modern example of this, an antithesis to the established accepted and “divine” norms.
For me it made me laugh out loud and have an
💡 moment to imagine Jerald and Sandra Tanner as the modern rendition of the good Samaritan. They are anti enough to have been the subject of a book called Career Apostates yet from all accounts they seem to be nice enough people.To echo Heber13, this perspective has helped me to understand new messages in the teachings of Jesus. He truly was a radical teacher. The characters in his story so often go against type.
Welcome Butters, to you specifically I would recommend that you supplement your spirituality from other sources (good books, music, hiking, etc.). With your spouse try to emphasize that you are still the same person and are equally dedicated to your family. As others have said, what follows is your personal journey. This can be frightening to you but also to those that love you. There can be a very real fear that now that you are not necessarily tethered to some of the norms in the church, there’s no telling what direction you may go next. When you think about it, for many people, there is a comforting predictability in Mormon life.
Again welcome, you are among friends.
Butters Hey, reading your experience and those of others helps me so much, thank you. It is a very comfortable place for many members, inside the “Mormon box” that is. You, like most of us here have seen outside the “Mormon box”. Some by accident, some by choice, some of us were perhaps pushed out, but once your out of the box, you can’t go back in. The question is should I stay in the church or should I go… I also grew up in a small Utah town and saw what happened to those who voiced their concerns to loudly or to the wrong members, they were for the most part, cast out, ostracized, and/or disciplined at church some were even threatened with excomunication. Be strong for you family, one day your husband my take of the blinders and you will be his anchor. Stay strong.
fatherof4husbandof1
Thanks so much to all of you. You all have said something that has given me perspective on all of this and I really appreciate having a place to go where my thoughts are understood. Heber13 wrote:I think there are many ways to find truth in this life, and it is not always just getting the same correct answers everyone else got on the test, it is more complex and personal than that…
more about “experience” than “correctness”.
Yes, yes, Yes, YES!!
Welcome to the site! I’ve been quite busy lately, so not as active as before, but I’m glad to have another woman here! It’s great to have the female perspective. As to your struggle, I try to avoid declarations. It’s funny because it’s foundational to F&T meetings – they say things like “you gain a testimony in the bearing of it,” which is true in that the more you declare who & what you are or what your believe, the more it because crystallized and hardened. But I would rather be flexible and open-minded. I don’t care to crystallize.
How are you doing since joining the site? It is fun to be among female friends 🙂 I have been all the places you have been and still am. I am getting further and further away from the church and my husband is as well. We recently shared this with our Bishop and family and friends and it has been rough.It is all worth it because I truly do have a desire to serve God and I will go and do whatever He wants for me, even if it does mean leaving the church, in the Bible I forget where, sorry, He wants to see if we will give up every thing for Him, it doesn’t mean we will have to but He wants to know if we would.
I have come to feel if I stay a member of the Church that in doing so I am a representative of it’s teachings, history and doctrines and I don’t feel good about that either, so for now I am being completely truthful with those who are in important in my life, and though there has been some sadness, the truth brings so much peace, and I feel like it is what God expects from me.
I would love to know where you are at with things and how you are feeling.
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